The iPhone did great benefit to the market; it really helped having this validation that you should listen to music on your cellphone. We’ve seen a whole market develop. I could never have marketed and created that – Apple validated it and that was a huge advantage. Look how we grew 15-20 per cent last quarter. How did the iPhone do last quarter? They shrank 42 per cent last quarter – from 6.9 to 3.9 – didn’t they?

Balsillie on how RIM’s philosophy differs from Apple’s desire to control the entire ecosystem:

Their way, it’s their store, their product and the carrier is a reseller. That’s not a moral statement about good and bad, right and wrong – there are choices. If you’re playing a leverage card end to end that’s fine; we work with a different environment.

We’ve chosen to play the enabling card and the diversity card. We want our ecosystem to have the enabling possibilities, we want the customer to have the choice of handsets, we want the carrier to be a managed services platform – but we want the developer to have the common platform element. That puts a fair bit of inherent complexity in for us, but we still manage complexity well at RIM.